« 103: What Lies Beyond the Gateway | Main | 105: Understanding the Unknowable » October 13, 2004

104: Alchemy, Alchemy, Hey!

I've been busy with other projects these last few weeks, finishing up a story for the first volume of the Misfit Library's quarterly journal and fighting the distraction of National Novel Writing Month. This will be the third Nanowrimo since I started the BOOK OF LIES and the fact that I haven't finished it yet isn't lost on me. It's a slow moving process, even if the rest of the world is hurtling onward at a breakneck rate.

So, distractions. It is alchemy this time around. I've been doing some spot reading on alchemy, realizing that, of course, one can't synthesize several hundred years of research and commentary in just a few weeks but, as we know, this never stopped me in any way before. A lot of the stories I've been working on have been bleak and dark, and I've had a request by those who have to put up with me on a daily basis for something a bit lighter, a bit sillier. "You know," my wife said, "like talking animals with guns." Which, I haven't failed to notice, is a huge concession to the 12-year old in me. So, emboldened by such license, I've been thinking about animal avatars, the Collective Unconscious, shared myth space, and alchemy.

In his book, Psychology and Alchemy, Carl Gustav Jung brings together his work on the collected mythology space which underlies our psyches with the efforts of the alchemists to more perfectly realize the human creature. There are four stages of the alchemical process: blackening (melanosis), whitening (leukosis), yellowing (xanthosis), and finally reddening (iosis). Jung points out that the third state -- the yellowing stage of the alchemical material -- was eventually abandoned for the more essential trinity of black, white and red.

The red powder, by the way (and this is just a random research detail which popped into my head), was what was purported to have been found at Gloucester by Edward Kelly in the 16th century and was used to validate a great deal of alchemical research during Kelly's and Dr. John Dee's travails in Europe during the last years of the 16th century. Gloucester is where King Arthur was supposedly buried as both Kelly and Dee were wont to mention.

While the traditional quaternity matches the four elements -- air, earth, fire and water -- and the four esssential qualities -- hot, cold, dry, moist -- and everything is happy happy hunky-dory, there was some shift in emphasis in the alchemical literature to align the states of the Magnum Opus with the trinity. And, as Jung is quick to point out, since the alchemical goal was never actually realized (skeptic, he) and the procedure of the Magnum Opus was never officially detailed, he believes the shift from the quaternity to the trinity is a symbolic one, a shifting due to inner psychological reasons.

The blackening is the beginning, either as a existent state of the prima materia or as a realized state from a process of separation (the prima materia made distinct from the dross of the world which hides it from everyday sight). This is the basic alchemical material in its uninitiated state -- its state of pure potential energy. Through a process of heating and combining (this is sometimes symbolized by the marriage of the disparate opposites -- the wedding of the male and female aspects), the black material is baptised -- abluted -- into a state of whiteness, a more purified state that is on the cusp of the sacred space. The white material has been slain, cut free from its primative state and resurrected in a body more pure and whole. This leukotic state is the moon state, a state that reflects the final solution, but is not yet there. "The albedo is, so to speak, the daybreak but not till the rubedo is it sunrise." (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 232) The final reddening occurs with the application of intense heat. By the light and heat of the solar furnace is the Philosopher's Stone realized.

So, what happens when the sun goes out? What happens with the ancient serpent devours the solar disk and the primal source of extreme heat is extinguished? Are our alchemical hopes all lost?

Posted by Teppo at October 13, 2004 08:13 PM

Comments

mr malkuth may also correspond Jung's quatrinity of alchemy to the citrine, olive, russet, and black of our physical kingdom.

oh, and to take the Ragnarok myth as a hint, after the sun and moon are devoured, the stars fallen from the sky and all the gods murdered, all we have to do is wait and it will start all over again.

the climax of the Elric saga also alluded to this.